Lamp Mode

To invent a unique but recognizable language is in some ways to create one’s own world. This book by Sergio Chejfec is one such miracle: introspection dominates these stories and yet they are full of outward representation; inventories of the senses and narratives of one’s own experience.

In the nine stories that make up Lamp Mode, anecdotes provide the platforms for a new economy of meaning. A pair of elusive but photogenic Macaws, a painstaking deconstruction of a snowfall, the engravings on tombstones in a Parisian graveyard, or misunderstandings at a literary gathering offer openings for a longer story: abstractions are intuited from the real as the uncertainty of the world is assessed and explored.

Somewhere between fiction, memoir, essay and philosophy, these tales take place in locations for which there are no maps. They present different ways of depicting the unique amongst the generic, and the ephemeral amongst the permanent. The result is a marvellous surprise: a form of austerity in which nothing is lacking.